Fast-Growing Remote Startups
freedomiseverything.com
freedomiseverything.com
At the same time, the initial application form for a lot of them keeps growing so for myself it just seems no longer worth spending the time to craft responses to these questions for a very small response rate.
Who am I kidding? It’s probably 750.
And it wasn't some prestigious or well known company or a startup pulling off something crazy. Just a tiny company doing a rather boring web application for businesses.
To me, that's not something to brag about.
If you get 1,200+ applicants for a single position, you're doing it wrong. You've just wasted SO many people's time.
Instead, companies advertising open remote roles should be more frank about qualifications (to deter unqualified people) and about demand (to save the time of qualified candidates for whom it's still a long shot).
If I knew there were 1,199 other people who had applied for a position before me, I would likely not waste my time, even if the application process only takes a few minutes.
"We ended up with over 1,200 applications for the programmer opening at Basecamp. If you’re having trouble attracting talent, feel free to copy our playbook: Hire remote, be explicit about pay, detail job exhaustively."
Also hiring people in other jurisdictions opens up legal compliance and other issues. So if you have an office in San Francisco and wanted to hire someone in Cincinnati, you'd have to follow a bunch of labor laws as if you were local, and then the other state you now also owe a variety of different taxes in. Then some stuff is even city by city depending on the state. So a company in Los Angeles wanting to hire someone in San Francisco or vice-verses might run into extra stuff to take care of.
So I could see as a smaller startup how this could be a huge hassle of keeping up with all the different rules and keeping track of everything as they change, etc. There was a company in SF that wanted to hire me but wasn't sure if it'd work out long term since never worked with some of the stuff they were using and didn't know if it'd last if I moved across the country, but I guess for only a single person in a state it isn't worth it...
Wouldn't surprise me if that HR lady would need to consult with legal and lawyers then even some lawyers and officials don't even know answers to everything. So easier for them if I just packed my bags and flew to California. Sounds like my state's interest would be making regulations on remote businesses easier to keep residents.
Kinda same with affiliate marketing which I dabbled in, I was in a program but got kicked out because the company didn't like a rule here. Kinda sucks based on your state, you lose out on opportunities. I guess the state wants more money from businesses remote, but instead they alienate the business. I wasn't making any money from that program but if I did that could have been a big income hit so sounds like the state trying to gain money from a business could back fire if they decide to just pull out. Then they lose out both tax money from that business and the individual earnings on sales. So instead of getting half the pie, they want the full pie but end up getting no pie in the end if the business decides to just kick the residents out.
Then you use cloud hosting? Your video game is getting popular in India, click a few buttons and spin up instances to make it faster for them? Sounds easy for IT but then they might forget to consider that some jurisdictions consider a server so then yet another thing to make you meet local regulations. Like India for example, so now you are operating a business in India and all the stuff that comes with it. However probably the way those laws are written would consider ownership, some might apply to just dedicated servers you own colocated instead of rented servers like a VPS or dedi the company retains ownership of, like some places in the US wants property taxes on servers and other business equipments. Which is kinda disappointed because some stuff might be cheaper long term building your own server and shipping it to a datacenter somewhere then the cloud, but got to consider how the area the datacenter is in would treat that. Then I know there was a case where Los Angeles County wanted to charge property taxes on a satellite in outterspace.
Seems we're living in the future with amazing tech, but when it comes to all the legal stuff. They wrote everything considering that someone lives in a house and commutes to work every day with maybe a week of vacation a year. They haven't really considered the idea of remote work or even people living in Vans, RVs, Boats, living out of a suitcase flying or cruising around the globe since those communities struggle. Even the laws disadvantage homeless people from voting, getting required documents they'd need to get a job or bank account etc.
Very discouraging stuff though, seems like startups are already challenging and then you deal with a very outdated stuff then some local jurisdictions like cities or counties don't even have this stuff online either. So I guess that's another hurtle if you wanted to hire someone remotely in a small town in the midwest for example maybe. I guess if you get funding instead of bootstrapping/doing it yourself you can hire the right people to deal with all this stuff and later grow each category into their own departments like HR, Legal and accounting.
My idea if I had a startup that allowed working remotely, maybe setup like a "hub" office in areas that are interesting so they have a local office to report to, and make the office have like a co-working type space for remote workers who come into the office or someone might want to do half and half. Sounds like less questions of how to handle certain things and a headache. I hope in the future they simplify this sorta stuff though as more and more remote gains attraction.
Someone else in this thread was discussing that issue also. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22554014
Although there are other complications and this is a really good thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563
* Well-run 100% remote companies - Extremely high application rate, not only because the pool of candidates is much wider (people all over the country and in some cases all over the world) but also because it's a dream job for many of them. In order to deal with that extremely high application rate, the companies need to figure out a way to turn away the vast majority of them as quickly as possible. In many cases, that involves up-front hurdles, like passing tests before you even get a preliminary call with an actual person. But because there is no coordination between companies, you have to jump through the same hurdles for every single application, which makes these opportunities infeasible for a lot of people who just need a job right now. There are a few services, such as Triplebyte, that are seeking to reduce the friction by letting you apply once and qualify for multiple companies, but their support for remote positions is still in its infancy.
* Well-run companies with some remote positions - These positions tend to be those that can't be filled locally because they are too highly specialized. It is uncommon for traditional companies with mostly in-office workers to be looking for remote generalists unless they're growing so rapidly that they can't even find them in their own market. Instead, for these remote positions, you need to have a rare set of hyper-specific skills. Chances are that at any given time, a job seeker will only match those skills for a handful of companies, so it's better if you're just passively looking for new opportunities, rather than actively looking for a new job.
* Poorly run companies or those paying below-market salaries - These constitute the vast majority of remote positions I've seen advertised. They're hoping that the pool of potential candidates is large enough that at least a few will be dumb enough or desperate enough to apply.
The one thing I'll add about 100% remote companies is that because they operate with much more written collaboration than a traditional company, the application and interview process frequently reflect that.
This is a big part of why you'll very robust application processes upfront. They want to see if you can effectively communicate your thoughts in writing.
I've been interviewing for remote senior engineering positions for the past 6 months and all of them pay significantly below market (market in my case is third-tier 100-person startup in NYC). These were all well funded, well known "remote ok" companies.
Now, it could be I'm overvalued, but afaict nobody is paying SV salaries, certainly not FANG salaries, probably not east coast startup salaries, and in some cases they're not even competitive with boring local companies in small midwestern cities.
Part of the reason I got the response was due to having remote experience as a consultant, and highlighting that I had that.
Incidentally I'm actually looking for an office gig now. I really miss the social aspects of being in an office, my main grievance are terrible commutes.
Freelancer are even accepted as remote workers in non-remote companies, after all, you're just another "external" company they are working with.
The barrier to get hired on a project are lower than getting hired on a permanent position, because the companies take less risk.
If you living somewhat frugal, the money you get from 3-6 months project work can be enough to pay for the whole year. So you only need 1-2 "yes" on your applications a year to get along.
I have to admit, what I wrote was 2 years of my freelacing career. I started blogging 2017 and now requests from clients are coming to me.
Glitch, formally fogcreek is 20 years old... Maybe has employees about the same age as the company :-p
You're right that Elastic and Github (and Stripe and Twilio) aren't startups. The list is really just the fastest-growing companies (not necessarily just startups).
This is good feedback. I might clarify this in the text before the table itself.
Even though these companies are big, they're growing fast and I thought it would be helpful to add them.
Edit: Also, we're bigger than GitLab! ;)
> Understanding employee growth numbers: Employee growth measures how fast the number of employees has grown. i.e. 100% employee growth in 1-year would mean the company has doubled in size in the last year. 200% employee growth would mean the company has tripled in size.
Revenue growth is a better metric to use for figuring out where to apply to.
Perhaps revenue-growth and headcount-growth are proxies for different aspects of the company?
For example, revenue-growth might signal how long the positions are likely to last, and maybe something about chances of the company being acquired.
Whereas headcount-growth may be a better signal regarding how much the organizational / management structures will need to change, and what the odds are for carving out your own role amidst the chaos.
Yeah if you're okay playing game of thrones and don't particularly care that the company you work at might not be serving a viable market, headcount is a good metric to go by.
Thanks for taking the time to check out this list and for commenting about it :).
Revenue growth and profit growth would be awesome metrics to have but those aren't publicly available for most of the companies on the list.
I think employee growth is the best objective metric because it captures fundraising and/or profit growth in one combined metric (because companies that are hiring either raised money, are making money, or perhaps aren't good at running their business).
This is really just a starter metric to compare thousands of companies to each other but obviously if you were going to join one of these companies you would want to do much deeper due diligence.
Not sure if it's the actual reason why the filter is missing on such sites, but it would be my personal guess if we had to take bets.
If you click on the jobs link for each company then it will take you straight to their job listings (will show you locations).
Labor law is local. If you hire someone in a different country (say, Sri Lanka) and things go south for whatever reason, they can sue you in the relevant local court.
To re-emphasize: by hiring an employee in that country, you've submitted yourself to the jurisdiction of the labor courts of that country. This supersedes and replaces any language you might have in the employment contract about the jurisdiction of employment.
Of course, enforcement is a problem. If a court in Sri Lanka issues your company a summons and you ignore it, the legal consequences will be limited (although you might be arrested if you ever visit that country). However, if that employee is located in a major country or bloc (e.g., the European Union), not being able to travel there ever again is a high price to pay.
In nutshell, this is why many remote companies are careful about hiring in foreign jurisdictions. The potential legal complexity is probably not worth it.
The con is that (as an employer), you'll have to require each individual employee to incorporate their own LLC and contract out their services that way. For obvious reasons, I can see more than a few employees giving this a pass.
Electronics is sometimes done sort-of remote by shipping kit to little consulting firms of one or a handful or people who work on it then ship it back. For them, remote means the supplier has their own little lab/workshop with scopes, soldering & other electronic tools, and other test & measurement kit. Not a lot else required.
CAD for product design can be done remote, and you can get the results manufactured elsewhere.
Finally, I know of a stealth-mode startup that is working on making custom silicon available at a low-ish cost, similar to the way you can order PCBs today.